30-50 feral blogs

I’m making a gamedev blog web-ring because there’s too many socials and I want to make games not posts.

A simple idea, vintage even, of going back to web-rings in the face of the further enshittification of social media. The tech giants are playing a cursed shell game with us, and the idea of being someone who makes games having to keep across 9 different social media platforms in order to try and catch as many sales as we can so we can keep making games after this one is enough to make me sick. I can’t be the only one.

I’m thankful that twitter wasn’t as far gone as it is now when we were applying for the funding we needed to release our game. Obviously funders don’t hand out money based on how many twitter followers a dev has, but it all goes into the big swirling mush of attempting to prove you have an audience that might buy the game, much like Steam wishlists or thousands of newsletter subscribers. It’s not everything but it’s not nothing, either. It’s part of what makes the death of twitter such a bummer for devs. Heaps of us have been using twitter to talk about our work for over a decade. It’s cringe but I’ll mourn it if it can’t come back from this.

But it can’t really ever come back, can it? The way enshittification works is the users are offered a great service, a deal too good to be true (free microblogging? free networking? choice!), this gets people hooked onto it to the point where it’s enmeshed with their livelihoods and careers, and then they suddenly flip who’s getting the good deal to the shareholders by restricting services and killing features to maximise profits. Maybe even without Elon it was on this trajectory. It’s funnier with him though, because he keeps hitting himself in the nuts.

The thing that keeps us on social networks when this enshittification has soured and curdled the experience for us is the connections we’ve made with other people. We want to feel a part of things. They know we can’t leave it without experiencing some kind of loss, and that most of us will stay until we absolutely can’t stand it anymore. But everyone has a point where they can’t stand it anymore. I left Facebook three years ago and haven’t missed it once! (Okay tell a lie, hearing there’s more drama going down on the Brunswick Good Karma Network again invoked a tiny wistful pang, but it was teenie tiny and short lived.)

So it feels like a tiny rebellion to retain those connections outside the spaces that have started to atrophy and enshittify beyond repair. I threw out the idea on socials (all 80 of them) of using my blog as a dev diary in earnest, creating a space to talk about my work and share things in a consolidated way that was still connected with community and got about 10 folks interested pretty quickly, which was exciting. I’ve bought a domain (30-50.net) to create a network of (feral) blogs where gamedevs can talk about their work and share things outside the socials. We’ve had this technology all along, and there’s no reason we can’t go back to it when we feel like we need to.

Devs will have to BYO blog, and Handsome Mike is going to figure out how to make little insertable applets that people can embed on their sites that have “Previously” and" “Next” buttons to connect our blogs in a big daisy chain that retains our connections and makes us feel a part of things. The domain itself will work as a hub that shows all the (feral) blogs in the web-ring for people who want a one-stop-shop or prefer to scroll. I won’t be encouraging anyone to post or nagging anyone, and won’t be hitting publish until at least 30 people sign up, but if you’re interested get in touch! Either on socials or leena@reuben.games.

I think we can do this without them.